Henry James Bruce CMG MVO
(1 November 1880 – 10 September 1951) was a British diplomat and author. Nearing the end of a diplomatic career in the Austrian, German and Russian Empires, he married the ballerina Tamara Karsavina. In the 1930s, he was an adviser to the National Bank of Hungary, and in retirement wrote books about his life.
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Early life
A younger son of Sir Hervey Juckes Lloyd Bruce, 4th Baronet (1843–1919), by his marriage to Ellen Maud Ricardo OBE, Bruce was one of four sons. His father, who was an officer of the Coldstream Guards, had country houses at Clifton Hall, near Nottingham, and Downhill, County Londonderry, and owned altogether some 22,000 acres. Like his father and brothers, Bruce was educated at Eton.
Bruce's parents lived mainly in London and at Downhill until in 1896 his father succeeded a cousin, Henry Robert Clifton, to the Clifton estates in Nottinghamshire. Bruce's youth at Clifton is recalled in his book Silken Dalliance (1946).